A Certain Method of Inquiry
Notes on Michel Foucault’s “the Analytic Philosophy of Power” and Politics at a Distance from the State
In Tokyo on April 2nd, 1978, Michel Foucault gave a lecture entitled “the Analytic Philosophy of Power.” In it, he makes several remarkable comments about his own work and how he conceives of it. Crucially, Foucault does three things that I think are clarifying for understanding how his work can be situated between philosophy and politics. These are: 1) he places his work in the context of a legacy of the thorny problem of philosophy and the state that begins (at least!) with Plato; 2) he begins to articulate something like the idea of politics at a distance from the state, a concept crucial to the work of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus; 3) he reemphasizes the non-normative nature of his project.
All three of these problematics are part of the bigger problem that haunts Foucault’s work: discontinuity versus continuity. In The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault had attempted to give an account of intellectual history that was fundamentally discontinuous. This attempt centered on the notion of epistemes, which appear in The Order of Things and are codified (and watered down!) in The Archaeology of Knowledge. For Foucault, an episteme is the dominant organizing knowledge system of an era. Crucially, it will be discontinuous with another one; the transformations cannot be understood as a dialectical movement from one to the other. In a more Hegelian picture, the errors of a previous system would be the seeds for a movement to a new epistemological picture – the errors would be sublated – but for Foucault, the errors are left behind. Any overlap between epistemes is either irrelevant or coincidental. Thus, each episteme is singular.
By 1971, Foucault’s had begun to move back towards continuity. He announces this move in his essay “The Order of Discourse.” This is precipitated by a rather harsh exchange that followed the appearance of The Order of Things. In 1968, a group known as The Circle of Epistemology penned several questions for Foucault. In their response to Foucault’s answers, they rightly pointed out that Foucault’s conceptualization of discontinuities presupposed a continuous framework. They asked, in short, for his general theory of singularities. He proposed the rules of formation. In a response The Circle pointed that these rules of formation had a certain transcendental flavor. Foucault never responded back. The problem Foucault faced was this: how to think singularity without abandoning the notion of singularity. Foucault leaves this question behind as he steps into his genealogical phase.
It is unclear what happens to singularity and archaeology in Foucault’s work in the 1970s. He freely admits that genealogy and archaeology belong together as part of a system that emphasises continuity and discontinuity. Yet, by the time of Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault is talking about developing a “history of the present”, and seems to be engaging in an enterprise akin to critical theory, with all the normative baggage of such an approach. This is in stark contrast to the closing of The Order of Things, where Foucault rules out commenting on the present age.
Foucault’s insistence that he never abandoned archaeology is a little hard to take seriously, given how dominant the genealogical method became in his later work. These lectures from 1978, however, suggest that the problem of singularity still troubles Foucault. This is evident immediately. He begins by telling his audience that he wanted to discuss the problem of prisons with them but has realised that the problem of prisons in Japan is not the problem of prisons in Europe. This is no deep philosophical position yet, but it sets the tone for Foucault’s discussion. He will later refer to the prison reform movement and draw attention to the fact that nations with relatively humane prisons and cruel prisons have prison reform movements alike.
We will return to how this issue of singularity is present in Foucault’s lecture, but first let us get a sense of the terrain. Foucault moves from the specificity of prisons to the general thrust of his lecture. Given that he feels remarks on European prisons will not apply to the Japanese context, he shifts to a more general topic. Why does the question of power concern him so? Obviously, there is the immediate question that lurks for any serious political thinker of the 20th century: the twin horrors of fascism and Stalinism (Foucault, notably, does not say totalitarianism). These are two extreme forms of state power.
Foucault here makes a comment that would bring great joy to figures like Daniel Zamora and Gary Becker. He states that the problem of the 18th and 19th centuries was the problem of the economy, of production and distribution. And now we have entered an era where the dominant question is one of power and its distribution. This might be good fodder for those who see in Foucault an arch-neoliberal (it is true, as they say, that the left loves an apostate, real or imagined). Yet he curiously undermines his schematic in the very next paragraph. There he says the philosopher has always been the one to limit power: “one of the principal roles of the philosopher in the West has been to set a limit, to set a limit to the excess of power, to this over production of power every time and in all cases when it risks becoming a threat.” This function takes three forms: 1) the philosopher as lawgiver (Plato, Solon), 2) the philosopher as counsel (Plato when he goes to Dionysius of Syracuse, and one assumes Machiavelli, although Foucault does not mention him), 3) the philosopher as independent, above it all, the one who laughs at power (The Cynics). In these ancient examples – Solon, Plato, The Cynics – Foucault is keen to point out that the Platonic City is never achieved. Even Aristotle, mentor and advisor to Alexander the Great, does not enact an Aristotelian city (or indeed, empire). Ancient western philosophy has never achieved the kind of political success of Confucianism (according to Foucault), where philosophy and state practice became fundamentally intertwined.
This fact, however, underwent a substantial shift in the 18th and 19th centuries. The emergence of political systems heavily influenced by philosophers began to emerge. The first example is the French Revolution, which takes its cues from Rousseau. Then there is the Prussian State inspired by Hegel, the Soviet State inspired by Marx, and, as Foucault shamefully admits, something of Nietzsche and Wagner in the “Hitlerian” state. They are “philosophy-States” defined as “philosophies that are at the same time States, and States that think, reflect, organize themselves, and define their fundamental choices by proceeding from philosophical propositions, from inside philosophical systems, as the philosophical truth of history.”
There is a bitter irony to these States, however. Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx are all philosophers of liberty, and yet “[t]hese philosophies of liberty gave rise each time to forms of power – be it in the form of terror, in the form of bureaucracy, or in the form of bureaucratic terror – that were the very opposite of the regime of liberty, the very opposite of liberty become history.”
Foucault has been here tightening a knot. This nexus of power, philosophy, and the State presents a question. What now of philosophy? One approach is to ask about the entanglement of philosophy and power. This would be to return to the question of the philosopher as anti-despot, as he (so often a he) that says “stop there, you!”, and ask if this is not itself a form of power, one that “lays down the law of the law.” One can say that philosophy should not concern itself with power, that it concerns itself with truth or being. Or philosophy can play a role in regard to counter power, if and only if, it no longer “consists of affirming, in the face of power, the law of philosophy itself; on the condition that philosophy cease to think of itself as prophecy; on the condition that philosophy cease to think of itself as either pedagogy or legislation.” Philosophy can still analyse, elucidate, and make visible the sites and struggles around power, but only if it “cease to raise the question of power in terms of good and bad, but in terms of existence.”
The next part of Foucault’s argument will bring us back to several critical questions. But first, let us try to understand the depth of these remarks. If we are interested in the minutia of Foucault scholarship, then we have here a nice, clear statement about his committee to a non-normative project. In articulating this, however, he is undoing the suture between philosophy and politics. A non-normative enterprise is one that can be used to inform concrete action, but not one that demands to do so. There can be no Foucauldian philosophy-State. This means that the second option he articulates -of a philosophy that steps away from politics – is actually also the third position. This is exactly the kind of space into which an analysis like Badiou’s emerges.
This, however, does not mean there is nothing to say about power or politics. Indeed, Foucault’s analysis suggests that this is the only condition under which we might be able to say something concrete and compelling about power and politics. How does he get there? He starts by drawing an analogy to Anglo-American analytic philosophy. There, he says the question of language is approached not from preconceived ontological notions of language, but from the question of how language is put into use. Likewise, Foucault conceives of “a philosophy that would have as its task analyzing what takes place on a quotidian level in relations of power.”
When Foucault looks at this quotidian level – which he defines as the struggles against prisons, schools, hospitals, the asylum and so on, of the institutional structures of everyday modern life - he finds something strange. The concern of legislation has disappeared. For example, those activities concerned about conditions in prison no longer demand specific conditions be met: “What one says is: no more prison at all.” This is a moment, Foucault says, when one is refusing to play the game, to engage with the premise of sound political action, and to participate in the philosophy-State.
What might we call this position—a refusal to play the game, a demand for better conditions through the articulation of an entirely different state of affairs? I think Foucault is close here to an idea that appears in the work of Lazarus. Lazarus articulates what he calls politics at a distance from the state. For Lazarus this is a rather particular concept, one that articulates a novel mode of political engagement without a specific object. This curious formulation is not entirely in line with what Foucault is getting at here but shares several important similarities.
Politics at a distance from the state means for Lazarus a politics conceived in interiority. This means subjectively: it develops itself by itself. This is a difficult idea, and it is worth thinking through an example Lazarus provides. This example is noteworthy because it has a certain quotidian element that matches Foucault’s own description of his interest and his project.
Lazarus focuses on an example from a factory dispute in the 1980s. In the general political climate of France at that time, there had been a move to distinguish immigrants and workers, exemplified during the Talbot-Poissy strike in January 1984, when a distinction was made that the strike was “the work of individual immigrants ‘unfamiliar with the realities of France.’” This distinction thus sought to delegitimize these strikers; they were not workers with legitimate grievances but immigrants causing issues.
Now, from the perspective of a traditional philosophical position, we would first be interested in establishing certain things. We might ask if immigrants are entitled to the same protections as workers, or if we can properly distinguish between immigrants and workers. Alternatively, we might invoke ideas of liberty, justice or fairness. These approaches would be for Lazarus objectal, and not in the space of the subjective that interests him. For Foucault they would be normative and too akin to approaching issues along the lines of philosophy and the Philosophy-State.
The above is also why Foucault’s position cannot simply be described as anarchism. At least not as the term is commonly used. The importance of his comments on philosophy and the state indicates a certain method of inquiry that does not begin with the normative. Traditional anarchism sets out certain normative principles that justify it as a form of political organization. And this approach has been the standard in the history of political philosophy. Foucault, with his indication of interrogating the quotidian level, is indicating a different method of inquiry. One that attempts to begin in the muck of it. Of course, there are certain theoretical presuppositions. This is also why Foucault sets out the disappearance of economy and production as central concerns, he is telling us from where his inquiry is starting. One might argue that he posits power as another abstract principle. This is true, but he does so only in the manner of a hypothesis. The crucial move is to then go into the details, to ask how power works from the ground up. What will we find when we look at things this way?
We should note here a suggestive analogy with Marx, that is relevant to both Foucault and Lazarus. Marx’s infamous delving into the “hidden abode of production” in Capital Vol. I leads us where? It leads us to the working man and the working day, to the employment relationship, the labour process, and the everyday of economic production. Here we discover a great Marxian idea: that money turns into capital via the trick of undervaluing labour. Exploitation is baked into wealth creation; the success of the capitalist must necessarily come at the expense of the labourer. This is a grand conclusion with major implications, but it starts from a simple, quotidian examination.
We should be careful here, for there is a sense in which economics is always about the everyday. What unites Marx with Foucault here is moving past a certain level of abstraction and grandeur into minutia and the immediate. It is an attempt to find where things get off the ground and to ask what is happening at this level. Marx asks this question from the perspective of exploitation, Foucault and Lazarus ask this question from the perspective of self-determination. Perhaps these are not the same method of inquiry, one can certainly feel the distance between their conclusions, but they are a similar method of inquiry.
Let us now return to Lazarus and his example of the factory workers. We have seen how their dispute becomes not a dispute about the abstract or sociological characteristics of workers versus immigrants but a political dispute over the term “worker”. A dispute that transforms it into what Lazarus calls a “problematic word”. The immigrants on strike insisted they were workers, and in doing so, they exercised a certain subjective self-determination. This is one example of politics at a distance from the state, a politics where “[d]eciding as to the existence of the word – thus forbidding its disappearance, subjectiviating it as what permits a transformation in consciousness of those who pronounce it” becomes crucial.
What can help us draw in the similarities between Lazarus and Foucault here is to also understand a certain element of novelty. For Lazarus has grander examples than workers in the factory. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and Maoism are also examples of politics at a distance from the state. Not because they never concern themselves with the state at all, but because they announce a new possibility of politics and organizing. These moments all collapse out of their radical subjectivist moment into a more traditional politics – what Lazarus calls politics in the space of the state -but before that they represent a commitment to novelty and transformation. And this commitment is there in Foucault’s example of the prison abolitionist, who does not see as the object of their critique any particular line of legislation or enacting of a certain concept of prisons but the very system of prisons itself.
In Foucault’s formulation, there is a loss of the restraining legislation of the philosopher, the one who lays down the law of the law. Foucault’s method leads him, through the everyday, into the halls of a radical and inventive politics that becomes the concern of Lazarus and Badiou. This loss of interest in the power of the transformative effects of legislature appears in a quote from Lazarus at the end of his essay “Can Politics be Thought in Interiority?”:
We reiterate, it necessitates a new approach to politics, and demands, from the very beginning, no longer centering or focusing politics on the State, and beyond that, on the statist form of power. A new politics will be at a distance from the State. The failure of socialism is not simply the failure of its program—the disappearance of classes and the wasting away of the State—it is the failure of a general centering of politics on the State. The objectival vision of politics is also, today and in France, that there is no politics except that of the State apparatus and from the interior of its logics such as they formulate themselves: i.e., to do politics is to enter into parliamentarianism…. A materialist rupture demands that we create, against parliamentarianism, a non-parliamentary politics.
A non-parliamentary politics and a politics focused on abolition instead of legislation cleave awfully close, as far as I can tell.
Foucault does not quite get back to the question of singularity that is bubbling underneath the surface of his lecture. It is a question Lazarus takes up in detail, however. In articulating a politics at a distance from the state, singularity becomes a crucial watchword. As Lazarus explains:
Because it is also a politics which thinks itself, without the aid of other doctrines: philosophy, history, economics, sociology, etc. The thesis here is that the subjective can not lead to anything but the subjective—the subjective thinks itself according to the subjective. Thus, it is a question of a theory of the singularity of politics. The abandonment of supports or referents exterior to politics, or borrowings from other disciplines, defines the statement politics is a thought. Thinking itself, it is a thought. The element of the subjective is an essential part of the machinery—one could call a politics in interiority a politics in subjectivity.
So, the trepidation with which Foucault opens his essay, his wavering about drawing a comparison between prison abolition in Europe and in Japan, reflects some sense already of this notion of singularity lurking where his reflections lead. It is not quite the same thing, but some sense of a certain incommensurability in various political movements is present. And in this sense too, perhaps Foucault is right that he never really gave up on the archaeological method.